Collaborate and Share - Flickr

What it is ~ Flickr is a photo sharing site. Flickr is different than other photo sharing sites because of their organization system (tagging) and because you can share photos with the people that matter most to you or you can share them with the world. But either way it is your choice. The tagging system that Flickr uses lets you organize your photos into batches and then you can tag the batch or photos one by one to help you remember what the pictures are. So for example, I have pictures from my vacation to South America and the tags I put were: vacation, Peru, summer, 2008. So if I type in summer all the pictures that are tagged "summer" will be pulled up for me to see.

So how can we use Flickr to strengthen our community? Flickr allows you to create groups. You can create a group and make it private or public. Whoever is in the group can add their pictures to the pool and you can start discussion about photos. You can collaborate on a company project, post pictures of inspiration for your youth group, highlight memories from your last outreach project. The possibilities for collaboration on Flickr are endless. Try it out .... FLICKR

Twitter ... what are you doing?

What are you doing? This is the question that makes Twitter run. Twitter is a micro blog where you can update your friends on your status, location and thoughts. You can receive updates through text message or you can login to your Twitter account and check your friend's updates. Twitter is great to strengthen your connection with a group of people. For a better look at Twitter take a look at the video below.

Web 2.0 - A Connected Community

I was on Facebook today looking at all my friends and I realized that there are some people that if not for Facebook I wouldn't keep in touch with. Throughout the year I used to talk to my cousin who lives in Orlando twice a year - usually during family get togethers. But now we are friends on Facebook. We comment back and forth and now I can keep up my relationship with her through a common tool we both use - Facebook.

This is the phenomena of web 2.0, the community aspect. I can interact with friends I already have and connect with people I have things in common with. Schools, churches, social organizations can really take advantage of the new web 2.0 tools that we have to strengthen and connect their already established physical community. Applicable web 2.0 sites that cold work for you are twitter, Facebook, tumblr, wikis, goodreads, and many more. I will take a look at these more in depth over the next few days.